For now I see
Peace to corrupt no less than war to waste.

Milton’s couplet sets up a moral equivalence between two kinds of social ruin: war’s obvious physical destruction (“to waste”) and peace’s quieter ethical decay (“to corrupt”). The speaker claims a hard-won clarity—“For now I see”—suggesting experience has revealed that the end of fighting does not automatically restore virtue or justice. In Milton’s political imagination, a complacent or compromised peace can invite vice, tyranny, or spiritual slackness just as surely as war brings devastation. The line thus warns against treating “peace” as an unqualified good; it must be judged by the character it fosters and the liberties it preserves, not merely by the absence of conflict.